Sukanya, Sid and I worked came up with many ideas. Below are some of the sketches – it was not easy for us to decide. After many different ideas and exploration, we decided to make a  kinetic hammer. We were inspired by Professor David Rios’ kinetic pedal synth. See here for reference video: https://vimeo.com/66357163

So we booked office hours with him to go over the materials and advice. We then sketched out a general idea of the circuit and form.

As we were making it, we realized how similar this tube and spool device was to the comedic “ShakeWeight” workout device. So we switched our idea to be a kinetic shake weight! See infomercial below!

For fun, I tested the magnet wire! Pretty cool.

Then, I tested the amount of voltage it generated without the diode rectifier to convert the current to DC.

We put all the parts together to make just one part of the hammer.

We ordered the parts very last minute, so we only had these 2 spools and those magnets to use. The rest of the parts we bought from canal plastics and canal rubber.

We first made the circuit with the diode rectifier and hooked it up with the multimeter to read the amount of voltage generated when we shake it. See Sukanya below, shaking to generate voltage.

We then added the LEDS to the breadboard to see how many we could light up.

We could light up many it turns out! We put them in parallel with 2 pairs in series.

We drilled holes on the top of the wire spool for the LEDs. Instead of 4 diodes as the rectifier, we used a rectifier chip and attached it to the bottom of the spool. Then voila, here’s out LED Shake Weight!

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As we waited for our materials to be shipped, Sid made another project with a stepper motor!